FORT KNOX, Ky. ─ During Tactical Combat Casualty Care exercises at Cadet Summer Training on Fort Knox, Ky., July 27, 2025, Cadets are taught how to provide emergency medical care with manakin’s with various wounds severity.

Some Cadets bounce between which branch they want to specialize in, but for Cadet Brittany Pritchett, Loyola University Chicago, her heart is set on Medical Service.

“It’s important to me because I’ve seen a lot of people hurt and being provided disproportionate service,” Pritchett said. “It makes me happy to see a lot of people learning about it, because some don’t take their time and teach this stuff.”

Pritchett is a pre-med major at her university. She has wanted to pursue the medical field since she was in high school.

“If you guys are in battle and your battle buddy is suddenly hurt, you need to know how to respond efficiently,” she said. “Helping a patient when they’re bleeding, getting their breathing back by doing CPR, it’s important to know.”

At 17, she enlisted into the Army Reserves before later deciding to join the ROTC.

“I appreciated everything that the Army gave me, discipline, family, time management,” she said. “You can see the change that you’re making and the progress that we’re making as a whole.”

To Pritchett, there is nothing more important than learning how to communicate with each other.

“Working with people that are from completely different, from different backgrounds, you’re going to get that every day,” Pritchett said. “That can be really hard and stressful sometimes, but once you’re put in that position, you have people to help you, and you’ll realize it’s not so bad.”

Being put into leadership roles during her time at CST, Pritchett has begun to embrace the opportunities to lead.

“Initially, I was a little stressed out,” she said. “It was a lot to deal with input from different people until I realized these people are only here to help me. You have to be the best you can because you’re supposed to be leading by example.”

Similarly to Pritchett, Cadet Joshua Laflotte, University of New Hampshire, plans to branch Medical Services.

“I think it will give me a lot of real-world skills that I can use in the civilian world,” Laflotte said. “I really just want to help people and having the capabilities to help people medically in the field and stuff is the best way to go.”

It is his desire to help people and words of advice from his father’s friend, a Col., that influenced him to join the ROTC.

“My plan was just to enlist after college,” he said. “But my dad was like, ‘Hey, before you join, I want you to talk to him and see what he has to say’.”

Laflotte plans to become a police officer for the same reason he joined the ROTC, helping people, and a great place to start is with teamwork.

“Teamwork is huge. You don’t really have to be the strongest or the fastest, you just need to know who is and how to use them to your advantage,” Laflotte said. “Put everyone where they’re going to shine so that you can bring the best out of the group and have the most productivity.”

With their futures in mind, Pritchett and Laflotte plan to take everything they have learned during CST with them into the world of medical services, one chest compression at a time.